What does your target market think of your brand?
How does your target market perceive your brand as compared to your competitors’ brands?
While brand research can be a very complex, exhaustive exercise, in many cases a simple approach may suffice.
If you plan to do your own brand perception research using online surveys, here are some tips.
How your brand is perceived
For brand perceptions, a quick and easy way to collect data is to ask, “Which of the following words would you use to describe our company?” Then give them a list of varying words and allow them to pick up to three. It’s a simple format for the respondents, and gives you very useful insights. Do people think of your brand as “smart” and “fun” or “stable” and “safe”? Are your competitors perceived as “friendly” and “creative” or “slow” and “boring”?
Other perceptions that we commonly seek to measure in research:
- This is a company that values its customers
- This is an innovative company
- This is a company that offers products or services that are a good value (or a good value for the dollar)
These types of brand questions are going to vary by product category and target market. B2B companies will have very different questions than B2C, and so on.
Brand Perception Research, Realistically
In an ideal world, a company would do very comprehensive brand perception research. But that type of time, and budget, is not always an option.
With some careful planning, many companies can learn quite a lot from a short, online survey approach.
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1 comment
It may also make sense to do some up-front qualitative work on brand perceptions before using an online survey. Some of my clients have determined brand questions to use in an online survey, by doing some one-on-one interviews or other exploratory research first. They were really surprised at what they learned and were able to include very valuable brand perception questions which they would have otherwise inadvertently omitted.